"Just" A Mom

When people ask me what I do its easy for the automatic response to bubble up, "I'm just a mom." I try not to say that though out of respect for all the stay-at-home-moms out there. When I was pregnant and trying to reconcile the title of Stay-At-Home-Mom I had a friend who gently corrected me whenever I said that I wasn't going to work anymore. She reminded me that I wasn't going to be working outside the home.

I'm sure some of you envision stay-at-home-moms sleeping in until noon and lounging in the backyard sun reading People magazine. I thought I might be doing a little of that too before I knew better.

The reality is that I do a hodge-podge of things, have a calendar that is no stranger to my fine-tip sharpie, juggle the budget and the bills, and try to remember to put on mascara before I head out the door (which didn't happen two days this week).

I've always heard people say that you couldn't afford to pay a stay-at-home-mom. To see if this is true and to give all you curious and slightly incredulous people out there a glimpse into my world, I kept track of my past week's activities and found the average cost for said activity in San Diego.

With a 15month old, my main responsibility is childcare. That alone is enough to take up my entire day and wipe me out. This week I also spent an average of 3 hrs a day cleaning the kitchen alone. I didn't dare count the actual number of dishes washed. I also prepared 20 meals for an assortment of 12 people, washed 12 loads of laundry, rinsed out many poopy (cloth) diapers, took my baby to a pediatrician appointment, baby-proofed the pantry so my Little Miss Independent couldn't help herself to her Daddy's honey-nut Cheerios anymore, diligently checked craigslist for the perfect porch bench, planned a garden party, trimmed a hedge, raked 7 bags of leaves, washed the car, met to discuss the new curriculum of our marrieds community group, met to discuss the needs of set-up team for a mom's group at church, paid the bills, got the run-around from our cell-phone company about getting my phone fixed, went to Costco, went to Henry's, went to Target, went to Wal-Mart.

The days get busy, but the best part of being a stay-at-home-mom is that I get to make time for my baby and I try to make time for my friends. This week I watched Super Why with my toddler in our jammies. I played blocks and had my favorite companion, my daughter, go on "adventures" with me to the stores, library, and plant nursery. I went to a writing/art workshop with a friend (thanks Hillary!), saw a movie with girlfriends, and taught my daughter how to go down the slide. We had a picnic with friends in Balboa Park and had other friends over for dinner. I read a book during Selah's nap and unsuccessfully eradicated ants from our family room.

According to average San Diego rates this is what I would have been paid if stay-at-home-moms got a salary.

Childcare: (We'll just count a 5 day work week) 5 days = $500
Housekeeping: (We'll just count cleaning the kitchen) 21 hrs at $10/hr = $210
Landscaping: 5 hrs at $10/hr = $50
Cloth Diaper Service: $20/week = $20
Essentials Shopping: 5 hrs at :$30/hr for personal shoppers= $150
TOTAL = $900 for the hours we counted.

Being there to watch Sesame Street reruns with my daughters soft blonde curls against my chest and fuzzy footy pajamas on my lap....PRICELESS!

The One

It's probably one of the most widely asked questions. I call it The Quintessential Relationship Question. "How did you know he was the one?" We've been asked this multiple times since we've been married. My unsatisfactory answer is, "I just knew." Deep. In my gut. In the marrow of my bones knew.

Nate and I have played the what if game. We've asked ourselves what if I hadn't gone to USD? Would we have met later in life through another set of circumstances and fallen in love? Maybe. Would we have lived two completely different lives? Fallen in love with other people? Married them instead? Maybe. Is there really only The One that God predestined for us? Or when we say that love is a verb, are we really meaning that love is the verb of choice?

Now, I am a very sentimental person by nature. I'm always rooting for Love and Truth to win. I think Enchanted is an inspired movie and yes, I have been known to whelm up in tears 30 seconds into a Martina McBride video. But the longer I'm married the less I believe that there is a One and Only. The reality is that there are a number of people out there that you could fall in love with and make a life together. But with marriage you choose one to become your only. Maybe they were farther down the list of God's preferred people for you to marry, but when you say "I do" they jump up to number one out of one.

So how did we know? I knew intuitively because my life is guided by intuition. Nate knew in a more rational revelation because he is a logical person, ruled by reason. It's my personal opinion that part of Spirit speaking to spirit means that we'll all be given this answer in ways we understand. Nate and I made our decision to wed and now each day we choose to love and make our marriage a blessing.

But I want to hear from you so I have some more examples when my single friends ask this timeless question. How did you know that your spouse was the one?

And I leave you with a word of wisdom I heard recently. The grass is greener where you water it.

For all you marrieds out there. Enjoy your spouse today and remember to throw a little water on your marriage!

Birthday Presents

I am now 27 and this birthday got me thinking. Mainly I am convinced that it is so much better to be 27 than 17. What a difference a decade makes! Picture yourself at 17. Yikes, huh? Now forgive yourself. You couldn't help it. You were 17.
By far the most treasured and inspirational change in my life has come through my introduction, friendship, courtship, and marriage with Nate. He is better than anything I knew to ask for.
I remember being 17, standing in the kitchen at work, my teenage female heart palpitating in anticipation of someone to love. But who? None of these jokers. My boss (who was always very kind and moderately protective of me) asked me what kind of guy I was looking for. I answered something along the lines of, "someone attractive, athletic, and who loves God and loves me." In my head I was picturing someone ruggedly swarthy, but with good hygiene. A Jesus loving Jeff Corwin type who could carry me through a jungle unscathed.
The only thing I knew for sure is that I wasn't looking for any of the guys I went to school or church with. Dating in highschool should be studied as an anthropological phenomenon. I'm sure just about every girl could write a comic tragedy fully fed by her own true-life experiences! My ribbon winners would probably have to go to Mr. Uncomfortable Silence All Evening Long, only barely beaten out by Mr. Stealth Dater who poses as a platonic friend then takes your hand hostage while he holds it without warning. Girls, you know those guys.
No, none of those guys would do. They couldn't help it. They were only 17 themselves.
Fortunately God knew enough to have a guy that could be my man, one that I couldn't imagine or articulate in a prayer. God also knew enough to not let me meet this man until he had grown passed his teenage pupa stage! Now at 27 I am fully convinced that life is so much better than it was at 17. Ten years have been a gift of learning to do life better. I'm anticipating that I'll be saying the same ten years from now.
Best gifts of the decade? Perspective. Nate.

Go With the Flow

If you didn't get to the dining area by 6:30, you didn't get breakfast. The elephant herd cut through the brush on the edge of the safari lodge's manicured lawn and followed toward the river on the other side, cutting right through the lobby. It was their mango trail. Their path was formed centuries before with the lodge imposing a new inconevience, but nothing large enough to detour the elephants from their path.

The same phenomenon is occurring at our house, only the stage and players are much less majestic. Instead of a safari lodge in the Great Rift Valley, a home in a San Diego canyon. Instead of a line of elephants, a flow of ants. One millionth the size and every bit as insurmountable as a whole family of elephants along a mango trail.

My mom waged war against the ants with a battery of talc and orange oil as they emerged from impossibly microscopic holes between the grout of our kitchen tile and paraded through our house along the baseboards of our new hardwood floors.

Nature is an awesome thing to behold. We rage and wrestle against it while it tacitly and tenaciously reminds us that it was here first. Our buildings accidentally constructed in the middle of their trails are not their problem, but ours. As I watch the ants stream down our halls I remember those elephants and try to internalize the lesson that sometimes it truly is saner to just "go with the flow".

The Toddler Diet

Next week Selah Grace will be 15 months old. What do you feed a toddler? The gates to a world of food are opening. It would be easy to get uptight and want only all-organic brain food to go down her pipes, but that isn't the reality in the house of Leboffe. Here is a list (no lies) of what our little one ate yesterday. It's my understanding that other toddlers eat like this. I'll just keep telling myself that anyway.

Breakfast:
milk
oatmeal
1/2 banana
3 LARGE bites banana peel
"No, no baby. We don't eat the peel. That's icky, huh?"

Morning Snack:
grape juice
purple crayon tip
2 in. of cardboard book binding
"No, no baby. We don't eat the book. Let's read the book. Come, let's get the crayon chunks off your teeth. That's icky, huh?"

Lunch:
milk
2 cubes mozzerella cheese
3 peas
1 slice wheat bread
grocery list
"You couldn't possibly be bothered with any more peas? How'd you get that list? Open up, let me get it. We don't eat lists. Thank you!"

Afternoon Snack:
milk
blueberries
petrified piece of cookie/cracker? excavated from under the couch
mom's mango popsicle
"Wow. Wherever did you find that bit of biscuit? In the future, we don't eat unidentified objects off the floor."

Dinner:
milk
rice
lentils
2 bites asparagus
3 lbs watermelon
"That's a lot of melon my child! Let's save some for tomorrow. Great eating today. We'll do it all again tomorrow!"

Big Saves

It was easy for us to see God's "big saves" while we were living in Malawi because it was so evident at every turn that we needed God's help. Some of the monumental ways God pulled through for us included: being healthy and safe while in Africa, never having to pay customs or duty on bags and packages, healing Nate's malaria, getting 80% of our post-malaria hospital bill forgiven, being sent on an incredible safari for the price of an $8 bar tab, a healthy pregnancy, friends from Johannesburg who let us use their home and car while we waited for Selah Grace to be born, not to mention the financial support that came in every month.
Now that we're living back in San Diego life feels a little more "ordinary" and its been a lot easier for God to do things that are hard for me to recognize. I don't like that. Things are going well for us and we are feeling more self-sufficient in our lives here, which if I'm speaking honestly, the control-freak inside of me likes. But I'm saddened to realize that I'm not as aware of the Spirit's workings in my life and therefore not as grateful.
Finding the Divine in the mundane. This is my new task.
Here is my new list of God's handiwork from this past year in San Diego: health for our family, buying a house, being given a car, helping to start a marrieds community group, making new friends, Nate finding a job, Nate finding a soccer team, and me getting to not have a job outside the home.
Yesterday as I was thinking about all this and driving, I got pulled over by a cop for the first time in my life! (Well, for the first time in the US.) I had apparently breezed through a stop sign while I was so focused in my discussion with Nate. But the cop was super congenial and didn't give me a ticket even though our proof of insurance card was expired. I think God is scaffolding my new effort to see the big saves so my efforts to be more aware and more grateful were ushered in with bright flashing lights. From now on I've got to keep my eyes open...and pay more attention to those stop signs.

A Favorite Poem

God's Grandeur by Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil. Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Playing in the Great Outdoors!

Parents' pride. We just can't get over how gorgeous she is.

Walking in the woods with my Daddy!

Playing games with Great Pa. And yes, that is a stuffed possum in Selah's lap. An unlikely stuffed animal, but she loves it fiercely. Can you guess what kind of stuffed animal Pa has in his lap?

Skipping rocks by the creek.

Vacation

We've just returned from a week of vacation with the extended family and are now feeling like we might need a vacation in order to recover from being on vacation. Instead we're trying to tackle the post-vacation homecoming of empty refrigerator and mountains of dirty clothes in hopes that today we'll eat more than the graham crackers and fruit punch Crystal Light we had yesterday and even have a clean pair of underwear to put on.

We had a great time up north. The family rented a house up in the woods about two hours north of San Francisco in a little mountain town on the coast. The objective of the week was to just hang out, see each other, visit with Nate's grandparents, and to let them get to know their third great-grandkid, Selah.

Master of the Bin!

I have this bin. Metal, about 6in. by 12in. I paid 50 cents for it from the "as is" section at Ikea. When I bought it I had big dreams for this little bin. I wanted it to be the bin where I could put all the important mail aka all the stuff I felt like Nate The Husband needed to see. The sorting started off strong, like all good will-powered resolutions do. And then...it seemed like the important mail kept building up. After a few weeks I asked the man if he had seen and taken care of such and such in the mail: it was in the bin. "What bin?" he asks. Oops. My bad communication. We recommunicated and truly meant to start using it for what it was intended.
And then...things came in the mail that I wasn't sure what to do with. In the bin? Receipts that we might need for returns later; in the bin. Papers stacked in piles on the kitchen counter; in the bin. People coming over and the counter covered in papers? Throw it in the bin! The bin an eye-sore in the kitchen? Put it on top of the refridgerator, toward the back!
I can't tell you how many months the top of the fridge became home to the pile of "important" papers. It was a good many while I lived my life too short to see it up there. When I did see it I shuddered. "Too much work" to go through that right now. "I'm scared to find out." This weekend I conquered my fears and got the shiny metallic bin down. I found: one very old electricity bill, zoo pass coupons, about 50 offers from real companies and real scammer companies offering to lower our monthly mortgage, health insurance survey, USD graduate school forms, Albertsons card, zip-lock of change, income tax requests, tax readjustments, tax confirmations, OU physician bills, march of dimes address labels, a teaching credential, and about 30 pounds of expired coupons and grocery store fliers.
It feels good to be master of the bin again. And although it still has a number of envelopes and forms that we really MUST deal with and/or find a home for, I consider it a victory!